It’s startling how few young people feel aligned to a particular newspaper. Gone is the idea of ‘taking a paper’. Today, we are far more likely to use Flipboard to browse stories from hundreds of different newswires, blogs and websites. We turn to Twitter to see what people are saying about the day’s news, before logging into Facebook to share commentary on it. We care about what our friends are reading, and what the people we respect are reading. We couldn’t care less about loyalty to a publication.
The explanation for this lack of loyalty is two-fold. There is plenty to suggest that the young feel abandoned by traditional news sources. But equally, traditional news sources have struggled to keep up with the voracious appetite for ‘social news’ – stories deemed worthy of sharing.
The online media pioneer
The pioneer of social news is BuzzFeed – the site renowned for its cute pictures of cats and lists of ‘life
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in